Manchester Arena Inquiry: Volume 3 Report

Mark Pritchard Excerpts

Monday 6th March 2023 Commons Chamber

[Suella Braverman]

On chemical precursors, we have enhanced our capabilities to detect terrorist activity involving chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive materials and their precursors, and to control and safeguard those materials. Since 2017, among other things, we have strengthened the controls on access to explosive precursors. We regulated sulphuric acid, for example, in 2018. In 2023, we have laid secondary legislation that will improve how suspicious activity reports are made. We have done a lot of work on that issue, but we can always go further.

[Mark Pritchard (The Wrekin) (Con)]

The UK has some of the best intelligence agencies in the world. They have many successes every day, many of which, as the Home Secretary will know, cannot be made public. However, they also make mistakes, and they admit that, as in this case and others.

More widely—but not linked to this specific inquiry at this point—is it not time for the Justice and Security Act 2013, and the memorandum of understanding that allows the Intelligence and Security Committee to do its work, to be updated so that there can be full, comprehensive, up-to-date scrutiny of our intelligence agencies, which have huge budgets, huge powers and a huge number of personnel?

[Suella Braverman]

We have a very high level of scrutiny of our agencies, whether that is through the Intelligence and Security Committee or the independent reviewer. In relation to the Manchester Arena attack, there have been several reports and hundreds of recommendations, many of which have been implemented by the agencies. There is a high level of scrutiny, but we need to balance that with the need not to tie the hands of our agents, because they do vital work and we do not want to start chilling the effect of that work.